FOR the regulars, the rank-and-file Giants fans who’ve been making these weekly pilgrimages ever since Vince Lombardi was drawing up the plays for Jim Lee Howell, what they saw yesterday had to be a wonderfully nostalgic highlight reel, a heaping bowl of comfort food.

All summer long, they’d heard about this new-fangled, high-octane, cutting-edge offense, plays that seemed to jump out of their grandkids’ PlayStation 2 systems, straight out of Madden 2003. The Giants, playing pinball with the scoreboard, throwing the ball all over the field, looking to fill the Meadowlands with shootouts? It sounded all so . . . trendy. So anti-Blue.

Then Kerry Collins handed the ball off to Tiki Barber.

And he did it again.

And he did it again, and again, and again, 24 times in all, covering 146 yards, throwing it to him two other times for 11 more yards, grinding through the Rams’ defense, bleeding time off the clock, keeping their heads low, running an offense that looked far more Parcellian than Orwellian.

And you could almost hear the audible sigh of relief cascading out of the mezzanine. The Giants looked like the Giants all right. The defense scored as many touchdowns as the offense. The ball stayed on the ground. And the scoreboard light bulbs survived for another day. The Giants would beat the Rams, 23-13, and all was right with the blue-tinted world once again, all was safe, all was sound.

“When you see that something’s working,” Barber would say through his best thousand-kilowatt smile, “it only makes sense to keep doing it until you’re proven otherwise, right?”

One more time, Barber reminded the Giants, his coaches, and the rest of the NFC that they can attach as much buzz as they’d like to the Giants’ offense, they can draw up fancy plays that make Steve Spurrier’s Xs and Os look as dull as the Sundance Channel, and it won’t change this primary truth about the team:

When Tiki Barber plays well, the Giants sure do win an awful lot.

“He was running so well, looking so good, it was pretty clear to me early that he was going to have a big day,” said quarterback Kerry Collins, who still managed to throw for 202 yards, though 77 of them came on one huge second-quarter toss to Amani Toomer. “I’ve said it before, Tiki is the heart and soul of this offense.”

He can be an adventure sometimes. There was a first-quarter fumble. He may or may not have gotten away with another, early in the fourth, when it sure looked like he had possession of a short pass from Collins before getting separated from the ball.

But Jim Fassel had the good sense to immediately call his number again, and again, and again, three straight times after the near calamity, once over right guard for 11 yards, once around the left end for 19, then another to the same spot for 17 more.

All of this he accomplished against the teeth of a desperate defense that needed to get the ball back. And they still couldn’t stop him. They could barely touch him.

“First game of the year, all you want is to get off on the right foot,” Barber said. “It’s good to do that.”

Especially given the awful memories that haunted Barber and the others these past eight months, ever since that blown playoff game in San Francisco, when the giants’ offense had looked so unstoppable one moment, so fragile the next. That was a fun game to watch for a long while, though it sure didn’t look like a Giants game.

This looked like a Giants game. And this time, the ending didn’t get in the way.